Tuesday, February 26, 2013

First Fairy Egg

Today my husband went to check on the chickens and came back with a rather lovely and weird surprise. One of our chickens had laid an unbelievably tiny egg. Seemed like something was wrong but after a bit of research we found out that this is completely normal and these tiny cute eggs are called fairy eggs or witch eggs. Apparently sometimes a hen will lay a fairy egg when something has disturbed her reproductive cycle. Sometimes a hen will lay a fairy egg or two just as she comes into laying, before her reproductive system has gotten into gear. They are sometimes lighter or darker than her regular eggs because they may spend more or less time in the "egg painting" area of her system, the shell gland. It is normally nothing to be concerned about.

I think in our case since most of our chickens are so young the reason for this egg is the fact that she is setting up to start laying more and more eggs. It's so nice that we get to learn and experience so many things first hand. We are new to the eggs business and so far it's quite interesting and well the chickens are so cute hehe